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PT: What is your
earliest musical memory?
Cork: My first major
musical memory was in 1949, my grandmother walking me to an equivalent of
what we now call a convenience store. It was actually a shack, the guy
behind him had chickens, and out front the guy sold eggs. It was right next
to a Fire Baptist Church, which was an all black church about ten or twelve
blocks from where I was raised in San Mateo. I grew up in Burlingame, and
San Mateo is the town that’s right next to it. It was the first time I had
heard live gospel music with a fervor. It froze me out in front, an amazing
experience. I asked her if we could come back, and a few weeks later she’d
actually brought me to the church. It was a time when race relations
certainly were not what they are now, and we were welcomed into this tiny
all-black congregation just to hear this incredibly powerful music. From
third grade on, when I actually had an allowance, I started buying rhythm
and blues records, or “race” records as they were called then.
What were some of
your early favourites?
“Flip, Flop, and Fly”
and “Shake Rattle and Roll” by Big Joe Turner. There was a third one by Big
Joe Turner but I can’t remember the name right now. These were 78’s; I
still have one of them. By fourth, fifth, and sixth grade I was buying
regular stuff like Fats Domino, and early Elvis when he was still on Sun. I
also had odd records like the flying saucer records by Goodman & Thompson,
where they’d splice bits and pieces of contemporary music together to answer
questions; they’d ask a question, then Little Richard would scream “I ducked
back in the alley...” I had “Transfusion” by Nervous Norvus - crazy
stuff... Basically, I had an ear for anything with a deep groove, like
rhythm and blues and even boogie woogie from the 40’s. I’d hear it and it
would instantly get my attention.
When did you start
playing music?
I began playing bass
when I was either a junior or senior in high school. A friend needed a bass
player; he wanted a band, he played guitar, he found a drummer and he needed
a bass player so he convinced me I should do this. I rented a bass and
three or four months later we were performing at recreation centers and
YMCA’s, Friday night sock hops. Of course, it was an absolute garage band
at its best, all cover tunes, all the bands played the same tunes. There
was such a smaller body of music for everyone to glean from, but it was all
pretty interesting music. As I got older, one of the things I appreciated
about being a musician at that time as opposed to being a musician today was
that you could get 3 or 4 people together and meet in front of a club and
you just knew 30 or 40 songs, because you all played “Good Lovin’”, “Money”,
Ray Charles tunes... you knew this stuff because everybody learned to play
an instrument by playing songs instead of just playing an instrument. The
concept of the virtuoso soloist which, came out of the 60s, when people
would just buy guitars and drums to become the centers of attention. Back
then, you were a member of a band and not just one of these “personalities.”
The earlier musicians were closer to being jazz musicians because they had
to be able to play songs in different keys for different singers working
with you.
So there was more of
a demand for live musicians than there is today?
The place where we
really started to work a lot was in San Francisco, North Beach in 1963, we
all had fake ID’s, I was 18, the other guys in the band were between 17 and
19. This part of San Francisco had maybe 25 to 30 nightclubs in a 5 or 6
block area, and every one had live music, so there was a real working
community of artists. You’d go to work at 9 p.m. and get off at 2 a.m. and
play 5 hours a night for $25 cash each. That was real money back then, my
rent was only $98 a month! It was absolutely great! You could sit in with
anybody, you got to know a lot of other musicians, and everybody in a band
worked 5 or 6 nights a week. It was a job.
How did you first get
exposed to electronic music?
When I was a junior in
high school, in 1962, I was introduced to Edgar Varese’s “Poeme Electronique”;
I was just very fascinated by the sound and the clearly the structure of the
sound. From the age of 12 or so I was interested in...let me backtrack a
bit. North Beach in San Francisco as I mentioned is the Italian section of
the city, Little Italy, and two things happened there. One, you have all of
the nightclubs there, and where City Lights Book Store is, and where all of
the coffeehouses are, that’s where all the beatnik stuff happened. It’s
where Lawrence Ferlinghetti published Howl, it’s where Kerouac and
Ginsberg and all of those people hung out, wrote, and sort of launched the
Beat Generation. There was jazz happening, there was R & B happening, you
had all this poetry going on, and you had Italian culture. My background is
100% Italian, and I was in that neighborhood. There were things I was just
exposed to in terms of poetry. You go to a coffeehouse to get gelato and
coffee and it’s the place where Gregory Corso is half-loaded on red wine
standing on top of a chair, reading poems from his little book Gasoline.
So there was peripherally, a whole sense of poetry, of meter, performance,
and when I heard “Poeme Electronique”, it just kind of registered in my head
that the same thing that was going on in spoken language was being made in
terms of these tonal statements; this wasn’t noise, this was a beautifully
structured thing. A little later when I got familiar with the Dadaists I
recognized the same thing from people like Kurt Shwitters that had been
going on fifty years earlier. He did “The Ur Sonata”, which are these
lengthy poems about one piece of recognizable language in them. The tone or
the pitch or the meter are like a dog growling at you. That dog does not
have to say a word! You understand the meaning! It’s as if someone says
something to you at a restaurant that’s not necessarily impolite but it’s
cold, impersonal, and you recognize that purely from the tonality. So the
language becomes inconsequential, and the ability to communicate becomes the
meaning of what’s played in a lot of jazz, certainly in electronic music in
presenting these nonlinear, nondiatonic constructed electronic phrases and
tonal clusters. That’s also happening in the San Francisco Bay Area. The
Mills College Taped Music Center in Oakland had a studio in San Francisco
above a nightclub called the Both And, which is over on Divisadero Street.
That’s where Don Buchla developed the first true synthesizer, the Buchla
Box. Morton Subotnick was a collaborator of Don’s; most of the things
Buchla made were made for Subotnick. Mort was the guy who took them out and
really performed.
When did you start
building electronic instruments? Were you an electronic hobbyist?
There was an event that
took place, it was kind of a significant event in ‘65 or ‘66. My band, the
Ethix, moved from the nightclubs in North Beach, we’d evolved into a
six-piece, which actually was a seven piece because the organist could play
the trumpet simultaneously. We were doing real show band kind of stuff. We
were working in Las Vegas...we’d worked our way up from the North Beach
clubs to a higher quality of clubs. Someone saw us, and wanted to book us
on a tour of Las Vegas. This was really great...we were making $500 a piece
a week, again cash money, we were young guys, 20 or 21 years old, working in
Vegas and having a wonderful time. We worked there for several weeks when
someone asked us if we had police cards. If you worked in Las Vegas on the
Strip, you needed a police card, if you worked in Las Vegas downtown, you
needed a sheriff’s card. Anyplace there was liquor sold and gambling at the
same establishment, you had to have these cards. In order to get the card,
you had to go in, have your picture taken, have one identifiable mark on
your body identified, I have a large birthmark on my wrist, and then have
both hands fingerprinted and both palms printed, and then you get this
card. Once you have this card, you can work. The first nightclub we worked
just took for granted we had them and didn’t even ask. The second club was
a little more proficient and asked. Three members of the band were underage
and there was no way we could fake our way through getting phony ID’s, so
three days after getting a great job, we had to leave Las Vegas. And that
was the end of my nightclub rhythm and blues career. I left Vegas and I was
really emotionally destroyed. We worked our way up to this point and then
had the rug completely pulled out from under us. I went back to San
Francisco, just depressed for six months. I hung around, watched TV, didn’t
do much of anything. I got a telephone call from the San Francisco
Musician’s Union, because in those days everyone was in the musicians’
union, saying there was a job for a bass player for one night for a young
woman whose father was the guy in the musicians’ union I found out later.
He was putting together a little band for his daughter. On that casual, I
met David Blossom, who would become my co-conspirator in the Fifty Foot
Hose. From the moment David and I met and started to talk, it was clear he
was coming from the perspective where he wanted to be involved in the
psychedelic music coming up, Jimi Hendrix, feedback and all that kind of
stuff. I had my own interest in fine arts and electronic music, and the in
the discussion it came up that rock n’ roll is electronic music because, if
you pull the plug, there’s no more sound. So we met the next day and
started inventing a band. From that day on, I started building little bits
and pieces of electronic noisemaking devices which just became more
sophisticated as time went on. The attitude was always to create something,
not to purchase something, not to buy a piece of equipment that another
person could have, but personalize an instrument. Develop the instrument
the way you’d develop a mark that you’d make on a canvas, a Sumi painting
where you’re just doing a gesture with a brush. Develop an instrument that
is your own that not only makes sounds you are interested in, but the way
that it functions comes from something that you’re very comfortable with
physically as well as intellectually.
Not unlike the
approach used by Simeon of the Silver Apples?
Right, I remember the
Silver Apples! From what I recall their approach was more pop music made
with electronic instruments. I liked the Silver Apples...
Tell me about the
signing frenzy in San Francisco by Mercury Records, where they signed over a
dozen acts in one day.
The attitude I guess in
New York and Hollywood, all of your basic big labels, was to send people to
San Francisco. The whole “Summer of Love” thing was amazing! I’m sure
you’ve seen all of the Time, Life, books, magazines, with the
hippies on the cover. The Brill Building was dead, and this was like,
something new. What’s interesting is that the people from Los Angeles were
coming from a completely different position. A few years earlier there,
songs like “Dominique” and “Volare” were big top-40 tunes. Then the new
music was what was happening. They were sending people out to sign
anybody! It was a massive signing frenzy! And then Mercury and other major
labels set up their own studios. It was worth it to them because they were
signing so many people, to build their own recording studios, in the south
of Market Street, to make things happen. There were great, state-of-the-art
recording studios going up everyplace - Wally Heider, Record Plant, Pacific
Heights, PHR Pacific High Recordings...everyplace. Brian Rohan and Michael
Stepanya were these two lawyers, and I don’t know how this happened but they
ended up sending these two lawyers who represented 25 or maybe 30 of the
bands and I wandered into Brian Rohan’s office and brought him a tape. Two
months later we had a deal with Limelight, a division of Mercury Records.
We just became part of the signing frenzy. These guys hooked us up with Dan
Healy, from the Grateful Dead, and he ended up being our producer for our
record. We could have done better with a different producer but it was
still a good experience. We got certain things out of Dan that we couldn’t
have gotten out of anyone else.
What were some of
your early gigs like?
In those days it cost $3
to get into the Fillmore to see three bands, or a silver dollar got you in
any time. To this day no one knows where Bill Graham hid all the silver
dollars he collected that way! He had to have tons of them! Anyway, the
show started at 8:00, one band came on, the second band came on, the third
band came on, and then the first band came on again. All three groups
played two complete sets in one evening.
Who did the Hose
share the bill with?
We played with Love, and
I can’t remember the other band we were with...it might have been Frumious
Bandersnatch, or the Rose Tattoo. We played several be-ins, and all the
local venues...coffeehouses, the Avalon Ballroom, the Longshoremen’s
Hall... Wherever there was to play, we played it.
Tell us some
memorable gig anecdotes.
One of our craziest jobs
was when we were all broke, incredibly broke, and I got us a job playing a
high school graduation and it was an all-girls Catholic school. Our singer,
Nancy, was 8½ months pregnant, so we’ve got an all-girls Catholic school,
we’ve got Nancy totally pregnant, and we’re trying to figure out how to play
some high school music. We were pretty much over the edge by this time.
The whole night was just a disaster, because we picked up a couple of
friends to work with us, one was a sax player who made Archie Shepp sound
like Little Bo Peep, just absolutely wild, over the top kind of guy, and we
had a sitar player, and to make a long story short, they didn’t pay us at
the end of the night. They waited until the end of the night to tell us
they weren’t going to pay us! When Nancy came out on to the stage, we asked
her to shuffle out with her back to the band, (chuckle) so that people
couldn’t see that she was totally pregnant, then there was this huge “She’s
pregnant!” rush through the crowd. It was a very peculiar evening. We
played a club called the Bermuda Palms, which was across the bay, a five
night run there, the first two nights they had “Fifty Foot Hose” on the
marquee, the next three nights, every night they’d change the name of the
band even though it filled up the club, just because we’d freaked the people
out so much.
Do you have any more
positive recollections?
There were a lot of
‘em. Playing some of the be-ins, where some of the sounds we were able to
make, sounds would just fly out of these huge spaces and just continue
going, and you could see that people would start to look into space, into
the trees, all around, because the sound was really melding with the
environment. It wasn’t just rock n’ roll coming from the stage, but their
were sounds coming from the sky. In San Jose, a be-in at San Jose in some
field, the sound system was great. Sound was everywhere, and not just
because it was loud, it was something about the acoustics of the bowl that
carried the tone. If a flock of birds was flying behind you, you could hear
it, or if a jet was passing by at the speed of sound, you couldn’t see it
but you knew it was there. It had that kind of spatial disorientation. And
then, there were just a lot of times when we’d be playing and people would
just demand the more avant-garde stuff. They came to see us, forget people
who want to dance! Those were just great moments. Some of the audiences
would just say “This is what you guys do, this is what we came to see.”
Sometimes we’d do, I guess what you’d now call performance art, where a lot
of the shows were physically structured around the kind of clock you’d use
for timing film development. We’d hit the clock and know we had one minute
for anybody to do anything...tie their shoes, throw rice at the drum set
which was covered with contact mikes, whatever, and when the minute was up
go right back into the song. Those were some stunning moments.
Did the Hose record a
second album?
No. We were supposed to
do a second album for Mercury, but the record company basically didn’t want
to pay us. They wanted us to go into the studio and work for nothing. This
was at a time when Dan Healy...we’d have had a better time with someone
else. We were very unsophisticated about all the money we spent making this
record and how all of it really works. If we’d have been with somebody else
we’d have spent a lot of money but probably would have been able to make a
second record. But Dan sort of wanted to go in, put us on a shoestring
budget, pay none of us for actually making the record, and I was married, I
had a kid, David was married, he had a kid, we just practically we needed
something for what kind of time this was going to take out of our lives.
We amiably decided not to do the second record even though we’d gotten
started. We laid down some tracks for it which are lost. They’re
completely and totally lost. We have no idea where they went. I’ve tried
to locate them a few times and had no luck.
I’ve seen listings of
a second Fifty Foot Hose album, I’ve Paid My Dues, on Decca in The
All Music Guide CD-ROM and on-line service.
Really? That’s
strange. We never worked with Decca, or even talked with anyone at Decca.
I’d love to hear it.
Well, maybe that
“official” statement from you will end that rumor. Who designed the artwork
for Cauldron?
His last name is Wood
and I can’t remember his first name. It wasn’t anybody we’d ever worked
with before. He was a guy who developed a great psychedelic poster with
day-glo colors and UFO’s. I really liked the poster and met the guy and
asked him if he’d like to do an album cover for us. He listened to the
music, and came up with a design using electronic symbols for transistors.
A lot of the other bits and pieces blowing into the cosmos are a combination
of electronic and alchemical symbols. It was released Christmas 1967, which
gave it a week in 1967, other than that it went right into 68.
Did it get a lot of
airplay or sell many copies?
Well, they pressed
5,000, and we never got any number from the record company as far as how it
was selling but we know they didn’t press any more. We did get airplay in
odd places. In San Francisco we got a lot of airplay late at night, on the
underground stations, playing longer cuts and stranger music, the DJ
completely stoned, and it’d be 45 minutes of music before you’d hear a
voice. And then it was sort of garbled. We did get a fair amount of
airplay, and then we did some touring, with this crazy show called “The
Flying Bear Medicine Show and Musical Experience.” This was something put
together by the entire Mercury family of recording labels. Mercury had 5 or
6 labels. Your college or whatever would get to pick one of three or four
headliners, Chuck Berry, or Mother Earth, one of the groups they
represented, maybe Blue Cheer, of that caliber. Then Mercury would pick two
other groups and you’d get this package tour. We did some of those shows
that were really fun, and pretty much all over California. It was
promotional for Mercury just to get their bands out there. And it did work.
Was it easy to get
the rights to Cauldron back for reissue on your own Weasel Disc
label?
Yes, Limelight had
completely folded, and the contract that we had with Mercury at the time had
all rights revert back to me seven years after the record was released.
That’s because Limelight, which was the Mercury label we signed with, was an
electronic music label, and in the world of electronic music more than in
the world of ASCAP or BMI publishing, it wasn’t uncommon for the work to
become an intellectual property that would become the property of the artist
after a seven-year period. It is much different than somebody thinking
about a Cole Porter tune that might earn residuals somewhere down the road.
Because each
performance was considered to be unique?
Well, to be perfectly
honest, it’s because they believed nobody was going to listen. If they sold
some records they were going to be lucky, but the whole Limelight imprint
was an experiment. Limelight was a jazz label that had been converted to an
electronic music label. They were in existence for a few years, and then
they went under.
What brought about
the demise of the Hose?
There were a couple of
things that happened. One was, the second record didn’t happen. Two, we
couldn’t find anyone to manage the band. The one guy who was our roadie got
lost one night with all of our equipment so we missed the job. He couldn’t
find the gig with all of our equipment in the car. We were approached by
the people who put on the musical “Hair” and they made an offer to us to go
into the cast of “Hair”, David as musical director and performer, Nancy as
performer, and the rest of the band in the orchestra, for union scale, which
would have been $500-600 a week. Everybody else went for it except for me.
I just couldn’t imagine playing the same music every night, twice on
Saturdays and Sundays, and so that was the breakup of the band. I went to
graduate school, they went into the cast of “Hair”, and I went on in the
quote-avant-garde in music as well as other arts, and never stopped being
involved, and everybody else faded. Nancy went to New York City, did
“Godspell” and “Jesus Christ Superstar” and then got married and had another
kid, I’m not really sure how many kids she had. Her daughter that she had
with David was adopted by her new husband. David, for a number of years had
a recording studio here in San Francisco, Blossom Studios; they did a lot of
punk records, some avant-garde records, and a great one for Michael
Bloomfield called If You Love These Blues, Play ‘Em How You Feel
commissioned by Guitar Player magazine. He was Eddie Money’s sound
guy for a while then dropped out to work with electronics and computers. He
still does voice recordings, but not for music...court depositions and
things of that nature. I don’t know where anyone else in the band is...I’ve
tried to locate them, some have had problems with drugs and alcohol...it’s
kind of sad.
Didn’t you produce a
film about the blues a few years back?
Yes, Survivors,
that was done in 1984. I love real blues, not Blues Traveler kind of blues,
I love blues in the traditional form as well as people who were influenced
by the blues, but not necessarily milking the blues sound. Guys like Nick
Gravenitis worked with Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and Big Joe Williams,
and Mance Lipscomb, and his life was changed being around that music. What
was interesting to me is that guys like Geoff Muldaur and Corky Siegel
showed the influence but didn’t imitate the sound. This is what drives me
nuts about most contemporary blues musicians today...they just imitate the
sound but haven’t allowed themselves to be influenced by the music so the
music they make is their own. It’s really easy to just become Mr. Joe
Wizard, slide guitar player, and not necessarily understand the transforming
nature of the music. For the film I got guys like John Lee Hooker, Dr.
John, Lady Bianca, Ben Sidran, Willie Murphy, Archie Shepp, a whole bunch of
people. We did two things that were unique...one, all the music was cut
live in real time, unlike say, The Last Waltz where it’s a
combination of three nights. Second, we let the musicians speak their minds
and talk about things they were interested in, which included race. Nick
Gravenitis made a comment about a point where the white musicians became
better than the black musicians at playing the blues because so many black
musicians were moving to Motown, and there was a shift in focus in where the
traditions, history, and forms of music were going.
And you taught for a
while...
Yes, I taught from 1970
to 1990. Sculpture, fine arts, several courses on art history and music
history. I produced other films about music. One way or another, I’ve
always been involved in music somehow. And then a few years ago the Fifty
Foot Hose got back together, though I’m the only original member.
How did this new
incarnation of the Hose get together?
People, fans just call
me, look me up in the phone book and say “You’re the guy from the Fifty Foot
Hose. Three of them were incredibly persistent. Sharon Cheslow, who ended
up writing this fanzine called Interrobang did an interview with me. Walter
Funk III, an incredibly bright and talented musician, Lenny Bove, who is the
bass player for Tripod Jimmy, and had been involved with avant-garde as well
as rock n’ roll music contacted me and has become the bass player of the
band. So these people got in touch with me, and then Windy, from Aquarius
Record Store, who supports more of the “fringe music”, was doing a benefit
to pay some back taxes from the previous owner of the record store, had some
good people like Barbara Manning, Mark Eitzel, and the whole day, from noon
to midnight. The Hose headlined; we went on at midnight, we put the band
together just for this one show, it was a fantastic experience. I don’t
think anyone in the audience was born when Cauldron was released. We
didn’t know it but as a gift for all the people who performed, they did an
ADAT recording. The word got to Japan, and Captain Trip Records made us a
very fair offer to produce, distribute, and release this performance [Now
available as Live & Unreleased]. A lot of that album is our old
music redone, but we just finished an album in the studio that has nothing
to do with the old Fifty Foot Hose - it’s really taken it into an electronic
zone. This is really my original intention for the Fifty Foot Hose.
(photo: Liz Perry of 50 Foot Hose at
Terrastock 2)
Cork Marcheschi was
interviewed for Ptolemaic Terrascope by Jim Powers © Ptolemaic
Terrascope, 1997.
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